Number 7: Final Fantasy (pick one)
Look, a great story is about telling a tale interestingly. It's not just about plot twists and important characters dying suddenly. Unfortunately for the teams behind Final Fantasy, they've been telling the same god-damned story since the original game. How's this for a summary:
Intrepid adventurers find one another, then form a band and seek out treasure and the solutions to whatever problem the nearest town has. Along the way, tons of ugly monsters attack, lots of new weapons and armor are found, and tons of new problems and new towns are encountered. The intrepid band begins to find that there is a darker evil behind all of these monsters, and eventually finds and fights this evil. But this evil isn't the real evil, it's just a henchman of the real evil. Eventually, the band finds and destroys that evil. But that wasn't the real evil, it was just a henchman of the henchman of the brother of the sister of some giant pan-dimensional world-eating monster that takes the form of some person place or thing. Eventually, the heroes fight this evil. Along the way, someone important dies.
Every single effing Final Fantasy game has the same stupid undertones: innocence lost, family members killed, an unspoken love interest between the silent protagonist and the hot female member of the band. As if this all weren't enough, these stories have to be strung out over 100 hours of pointless busy-work gameplay in order to make them feel like they're more than a rote retelling of the same old bull****.
Number 6: Doom 3
Jesus on a stick: who cares about the story here, you ask? No one, and that's why it sucks. This was a game about blowing up monsters on Mars. Monsters from hell. On Mars. Woo hoo, well done id, fleshing out that enormous Doom backstory with 5 minutes of walking around without monsters attacking. A brilliant design choice, really, for a game that never had much a story to begin with. When you get right down to it, Doom 3 would have been better if they'd simply plopped you into a dark room with a hand gun and a flashlight and said "kill." Would have saved us all the trouble of expecting more plot points after the initial 3 minutes of gameplay.
Number 5: Blaster Master
In the American version of Meta Fight, known in the states as Blaster Master, a young boy joins the fight against a demonic underworld because his frog ran away. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather just buy a new frog and let the whole underground war sort itself out. It may be one of the greatest NES games of all time, but it's confounding how much the main character is willing to go through for a frog. Doesn't he know they cost eight bucks at the local pet store?
Number 4: Seven Samurai 20XX
For anyone unfamiliar with the film this PS2 game is based on, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, it is regarded as one of the greatest motion pictures ever created. The innovative filmmaking techniques used in the film continue to be used in movies to this day. Sometime in 2004, Kurosawa's masterpiece was crapped all over by this video game "adaptation" that took the basic premise of this movie and mixed in cyborgs, robots, and other futuristic clichés. What's next, The Godfather in space, Citizen Kane with hoverboards and flying cars!?
Number 3: Super Mario Anything
Story? There is no story here! It's just Princess Peach, or maybe Daisy, being kidnapped by some monster, and Mario has to save her. Perhaps if one of the Mario games delved into the backstory behind Mario it would make things more interesting. Perhaps Mario isn't just a wayward plumber, but some kind of fecalphiliac who enjoys popping up out of the pipes when ladies are going pee. Or perhaps his brother is a drug addicted pedophile. Or maybe Princess Peach gets raped by Bowser.
But no, none of that ever happens. We just get Mario bouncing around on mushrooms and killing turtles. No explanation, no backstory, just a kidnapping.
Number 2: Tetris
Even though Tetris is the world's most popular puzzle game to this day, we still have never learned what the f*ck is going on this twisted Russian game. Why are the blocks falling? What reason could they have for dropping down, one at a time? And why do they vanish when they make a full line? Is this how the protagonist must pay off his bookies? And who the hell is the protagonist? Are we supposed to be one of the cosmonauts we see in the background, or one of the straight line pieces that never arrive when you need them? Where are all these f'cking blocks coming from anyway? If Alexi Pajitnov had just taken a few more minutes to draw the area above the play screen, we may have seen the truth: all those pieces are actually logs of dung being excreted by the world's most terrible monster.
If the player doesn't match them up for proper decomposition, these logs will pile so high that the entire world will be consumed by the dung beetles and maggots attracted by the stinking scent of the cursed loaves. You see, behind it all, Tetris has the same story as every game: stop them from blowing up the world, god dammit. Or at least, stop them from covering the world in perfectly right-angled sh*t logs. God dammit.
Number 1: All Metal Gear Solid Games
There is no single piece of media in the world that includes as convoluted and dramatic a story as the games in the Metal Gear Solid series. Anyone who has played the MGS series knows that Solid Snake is surrounded by helpers who are also full time soap opera stars. Even Raiden, Snake's bull**** second-fiddle from the second game, has a whole staff of over-dramatic philosophers and super secretive helpers. There's no encapsulating these stories, because the plot points that crop up are more like shambling trash points of random connections. Here's your standard MGS scene:
Snake is in the massive air ducts of some super secret military facility in Uzbekistan, where he has been given the simple task of stealing sergeant Maffussafavitzchagooberinstovanioff's sandwich. The Sergeant is holed up in a room directly beneath Snake. Snake gazes down from the vent opening at the sergeant's sandwich, preparing to leap down and throttle the guy. Suddenly, that codec sound begins resonating, and Snake is on com with his boss, the chatty major in the beret. The two discuss Snake's history of sandwich stealing, and Snake begins to question what the purpose of all this sandwich stealing really is. But Snake doesn't just question it, he begins a long monologue explaining his feelings, and the history of the sandwich. He questions the Earl of Sandwich's motives in making the first sandwich, and cites the years of violent meat slicing that have ensued following the sandwiches inception. Snake's boss then reciprocates by revealing the details of a secret government sandwich conspiracy, which Snake has unwittingly helped to create with his work in Japan in 1983. Now, the conversation turns to Japan, all the while the sergeant is below Snake in his office quietly eating his sandwich, and occasionally looking up to wonder why the heating duct is talking to itself.
Now, Snake's conversation is interrupted by a small Asian woman who bursts onto the codec now, questioning how Snake's new pair of super sneakers are handling. Snake responds by describing a tight situation he was in last year while sandwich stealing in Iran. His boss then jumps in and introduces this Asian woman, and she begins to giggle about how excited she is to be working with the great sandwich stealer of our time. She then etolls the virtues of Snake's new shoes, to which Snake responds by complimenting the Asian woman on the size of her tits. She squeals with delight, and Snake mashes his tongue onto the codec, hoping to make out with her from 3000 miles away.
Snake's boss then burst back in to remind him that he's there to steal sandwiches, not to hit on the Asian woman. Snake agrees, then returns to his lengthy diatribe on the futility of sandwich making.
Shake this sort of interaction up, then service with a side of Snake's evil clone and a stolen nuclear warhead. Sprinkle liberally with traitors somewhere in Snake's codec, then garnish with a hearty helping of secret helpers hiding around the complex, and genetically modified super soldiers trying to kill Snake, and you've got a recipe for the most obnoxiously overblown series in all of gaming.
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